Fight X Flight...
Story State Action Procedures
You’ve all heard the phrase. It’s become a catchphrase, shorthand in the modern person’s lexicon. We use it to talk about other shorthand terms like trauma, stress, the nervous system… all terms that we don’t know what they mean and that we don’t agree on.
All these terms are like silly putty, we imprint on them with our personal and colonized feelings, ideas, fantasies…
What got me thinking about this today is the word we use in between fight-flight, that “or”. Fight OR flight. Like there’s some kind of binary choice, a switch that turns to one of two directions.
What I witness in most people, including myself, is that there is a predominance of Fighting and Fleeing simultaneously, along with a few other F words. But for the sake of this post, we are just examining these “two” states and their behaviors.
Because we live in a socio-economic system of constant threat and violence, people under capitalism are constantly fighting (striving for constant growth, hoarding resources, consuming in excess, aggressively advancing) AND AND AND constantly Fleeing (eternally trying to escape, transcend, become, transform themselves and their situation into some other version of reality).
What I can see in this combined state of FIGHTFLEE is that in all cases, there is never ever any sense of satisfaction, fulfillment, contentment or enoughness ever. It is a perpetual “race & chase” set-up. This is a hallmark of addiction neurologically, but it’s so baked into the economic and social fabric that many people can’t see that it is an addiction cycle. It’s become “just how it is” — hypernormal and thus invisible.
For me, this means that the terms we use to describe nervous system states under colonial capitalism do not work. Here is a sequence of thoughts around it.
Fight-or-flight is best used to describe situations that are similar in regard to our distant past, such as running from a tiger or fighting a bear. These are acute situations that have discrete beginnings and endings.
We have to use non-binary language that describes both-and situations as well as complex ongoing ecosystemic relational dynamics with knowledge about how addiction works neurologically, socially, culturally, etc.
We have to understand how various interventions (not “solutions”) function within these situations. If we do not want to be honest about addiction or even the possibility of it, we will not be able to nudge the systems involved towards wellness.
Part of natural wellness is decline and not feeling OMG amazing all the time. If we are aiming for a situation where we “feel great” constantly, that is in itself an addictive cycle. What we need to be aiming for is a middle, neutral situation of feeling “enough” (I call this “The sublime”). If “enough ain’t never good enough”, therein lies the issue — it is an internal maladaptation of the system’s predictive, interoceptive and internal relationships (mind, self-talk, a predictive system dialed towards dopamine addiction, etc).
Here are some examples that I find to be useful.
Imagine a scenario where someone tells you “I have the perfect solution: We are going to create a world where all you do is inhale, and you never need to sleep”. How does that make you feel physically? If you think this is a good idea or your body wants this, then you know you are under the maladaptive spell of yang derangement. You may have a predominantly yang constitution and/or are under the bias that yang is the only pattern that is good.
Make a fist as hard as you can and don’t stop. Notice how much effort it takes to keep a fist contracted. This is what a mal-adapted nervous system and physiology is doing. It is making a fist (for “protection” purposes) and using what little resources it has to continue making that fist. Imagine your intestines making a fist — no food can be digested because the tube is contracted. Now after you are tired of making the first, just let it go! Feel all that blood flow rushing back into the fingers, etc. This is what we are looking to spark in the system multiple times a day.
This is not merely “rest & digest” as a concept, but a physiological gear shift that can be felt - if you can’t feel it, and if there are no other baseline tests that improve (such as range of motion, HRV, peripheral vision, etc) then that system has not received the correct inputs or enough repetitions of a correct input in order to signal to the body that it is safe enough to release the fist or that it can release the fist.
Takeaways
Ideas and languaging that model colonial ideas are not useful or relevant. They cause more harm by shortcutting relational dynamics.
What we train/practice/repeat is what we get better at. We can get better at anything, including addiction and maladaptation. We are always training something. Look at what your nervous system is actually practicing in the present moment right now. If you can’t understand or describe that (and can’t change it in the moment), this indicates the level of your neuro-colonization.
Not knowing how to be content with enough or not knowing how to pause your striving is another red flag of neuro-colonization. Your brain as a prediction system is wired harmfully. This is not “your fault” but rather how your particular constitution (on a spectrum of very yang to very yin) is trying to align with and/or protect itself from the stimulus and inputs of your sum total environment (social, cultural, economic, mental, narrative, material, etc). You need to learn how to deal with that and/or change your environments.
Learning to let go (lose, fail, fast, restrain, withdraw, retreat, pause, stop, forget, die, exhale, rest, relax, regenerate, renew, sleep, etc) is generally the missing section of our behavioral menu of options. These are all more yin behaviors/dynamics/expressions. I recommend walking backwards — as slow as necessary to avoid injury — daily for 100 steps as a beginning protocol.
You can’t heal your way out of a globally oppressive socio-cultural economic system. You have to redefine your objectives and terminologies. You need to properly contextualize.
For more detailed and personalized recommendations, you can book sessions with me where I teach you this based on your personal astrology, divination and somatic testing.
Donation Links
venmo at dare-sohei
My baseline for the entire right side of my body is that clenched fist :-/ so in thrall. Fightflee is exactly the feeling. It's so much bigger than me, like I'm a front line of it. Like every body is a front line, I guess? I'm trying to get curious about the postures of noticing that feed it vs the postures of noticing that can feel for other opportunities
Thank you for the walking backwards protocol!